windows root

When I returned to my computer, which had been playing music, there was a message--windows could not start because the following file was missing or corrupt-- (windows root)\system32\hal.dll. Please reinstall a copy of the above file.

This is a Fry's computer with bundled software and reinstallation will set the computer back to factory settings. This means all stored information will be lost. Would rather avoid this if possible. Thanks,

 

See if the information on this page helps.

 

Hi jim mindy, And welcome aboard.

You are likely in for some rough road since your recovery possibilities are limited to a full restore to original settings, both user data and system.

If you have important user data that you would like to save, you'll need to get it backed up to some other media.

This is one of the hard lessons with XP. The Hal.dll of XP is comparable to the VMM32.VXD of the Win9X days. You can't easily regenerate it and you should have a backup copy for times like this. The sad part is, if you have NTFS formatted partitions, it wouldn't help to have a backup copy if you couldn't gain access to the Recovery Console, which you can only install and use if you have a full install CD available. The old catch 22 again. I think they just want our money.

In your case, if you have a burner, get your treasures burned to disk. You'll need something like Drive Image or Ghost, (work from their own boot disk and can image unbootable partitions even) to place your drive image to cd's or whatever other media you have available and you'll have good access to your personal stuff after doing the Restore using your supplied disk from Fry's. You'll still need to re-install any added software, so be aware and prepare for that. btw, you'll have to create the Drive Image or Ghost boot disks on some other healthy machine now that you are unbootable.

I'll have to mention that if you had previously made a copy of your drive using either Drive Image or Ghost, you wouldn't be in the predicament you are now, but I don't mean to rub it in.

Good luck!